Microsoft has released a beta SDK for Windows, allowing Windows developers to officially make use of the XBox Kinect hardware. From their own press release: "The Kinect for Windows SDK, which works with Windows 7, includes drivers, rich APIs for Raw Sensor Streams, natural user interfaces, installer documents and resource materials. The SDK provides Kinect capabilities to developers building applications with C++, C# or Visual Basic using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010."

Well, what else were they going to do? Allow an open source, cross platform SDK independent of Microsoft to gain traction? With a Windows-based SDK using Visual Studio, young programmers will be happily trapped on a Windows stack for decades! It’ll be this decade’s Access.